The Panacea to the global ill of foreign oil:
This article highlights a solution, which seems surprisingly similar to alchemy and could be the boon of the modern age. Agricultural and industrial waste, currently piled up in landfills, can be converted to useful elements such as oil (at a production cost at fifteen dollars per barrel, significantly cheaper and nearly half of the current world price of around thirty dollars), water (water scarcity is the new scare for environmentalists and this growing fear warranted a mention from the National Geographic) and residual biodegradable waste.
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.
"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."
The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.
Zachary Latif 18:04 |
